


Cold

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Community: watsons_woes, Gen, Post-His Last Vow, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 04:54:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1969767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspector Javert spent two decades tracking down a bread thief. Dilettante.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2014 July Watson’s Woes Prompt #16, brought to you by [**maestress83**](http://maestress83.livejournal.com/) and John Dryden: **Words of Wisdom.** "Beware the fury of a patient man." (John Dryden)
> 
> This story assumes that Sherlock’s plane does NOT make a U-turn 4 minutes into his assignment to Eastern Europe at the end of “His Last Vow.”

Peter poured the second shot down. The first vodka banished the heat of summer, the second conjured the heat that unknotted his bones. 

“Good for rheumatism, eh, Peter Andreivich?” Vitaly Ivanovich said, laughing. “At our age, that’s the beast.”

Peter laughed at his old friend. How many years had they come here – first after work in the factory, then after retirement? Vitaly had been a good friend when he’d first come to this town after his last job, nearly thirty years ago. Vitaly’s wife Anya made enough for four when he called on them with his own wife Marya, and Marya did the same for the Solomins. They’d complained about the foreman, clicked their tongues over the news; Vitaly had been an uncle in all but blood to Peter and Marya’s three, proudly dancing with Lise at her wedding, whom he’d once dandled on his knee. 

After the life he’d led in his youth, Peter had appreciated everything afterward; the dullness of factory work, the sameness of day-to-day life here, the vegetable garden, the walks in the square, the chess games with Vitaly, the evenings watching television with Marya. Premiers came and went, presidents were elected and not elected, politics swirled around them; but this life stayed the same. 

Vitaly thumped Peter on the shoulder. “My Anya and I will be expecting you tonight, Peter. What a beautiful cold dish she has made!” 

Peter nodded, smiling. The only other way to get through these ghastly summers. 

“We are having another couple over tonight, Peter Andreivich,” Vitaly signaled the barman. “Friends are visiting!” The nearly bald man’s eyes twinkled over his great bushy moustache as he handed Peter the third shot and downed his own.  

Peter nodded, saluted his old friend and drank. 

*** 

_ Boizhe moi _ , he was getting old, if a mere three vodkas could make him pass out like that. 

The room was cool; it felt lovely, after the stifling heat of the day and the heat pounding in his head. Peter slowly sat up. 

Or tried to sit up. His body was so heavy it wouldn’t rise from the ground. No. No, his hands were held. Manacled. He was manacled to the bed. So were his ankles fettered. 

He looked around, blinking. 

A concrete room. No windows. A small vent and intercom on the ceiling, 10 feet straight up. He was on a pallet on the floor. Nothing sharp or metallic in that room, nothing jutting, no rafters – nothing that could facilitate suicide at all. 

His old life rushed back with a thunderclap that doused every limb in ice. 

“Good evening, Peter Andreivich Demidov.”

He blinked. No. No, this was a dream. He was still drunk, sleeping. That explained this room, and the voice on the intercom that sounded like his friend. But why would Vitaly Ivanovich Solomin sound so … icy? And why did he speak with an English accent? 

It had been years since he’d dreamed of the old days. They were long gone. He was just a retired factory worker now; he’d done his service for his country decades ago. 

The voice that was his friend and was not his friend continued. 

“On 17 October, 2014, a British operative working in Albania was taken captive by four Russian and Polish operatives, who turned him over to the intelligence director of their sector. This British operative was subsequently interrogated for information before being tortured and killed.” The voice could have been carved from ice. “The date of this operative’s death is at present unknown, but it took place between 18 October 2014 and 30 October, 2014 – the date his eyeless, tongueless, and fingerless body was dumped in front of the British Embassy with his genitalia sewn into his mouth.” 

An ice-bath woke Peter up completely. He was conscious, alert, acutely aware of everything said, very much aware that he was not asleep, not dreaming. And the past was before his eyes as if it had never left. 

2014\. Over thirty years ago. There had been other deaths, other interrogations. The tall pale Englishman had held out as long as most of them. Queer, too – the last thing he’d screamed before they’d torn out his tongue was a man’s name, not a woman’s. 

There had been others, before and after. The work was the work; dangerous, ugly, important work for the state, for the boss. He’d had another assignment, and then another. Two years after that, he’d retired. He’d had no ambition, no desire to be in the director seat with a dozen cross-hairs on him. He’d moved here, met Vitaly at the factory. 

_ Vitaly. _

Vitaly-not-Vitaly’s ice voice continued. “The intelligence director was dealt with first, and easiest. He did not know your names and had not dealt with you directly; it took longer to track down exactly which officers and police carried this information.” 

Thirty years, in God’s name! Peter shook with horror. Sensible operatives knew the risks, accepted them! So did their supervisors. Who could have been lying in wait for thirty Goddamned years – become friends, work in a factory, dandle a baby, dance with a bride – just to spring a trap?

“I have kept you close for twenty-eight years, Peter Andreivich Demidov. Last week my faithful assistant – whom you know, but whose real name is not Anya and who is not, in fact, my wife – informed me that the last of the other four who executed this operative has finally been tracked down and taken. All of them now occupy cells in this block.”

Not Vitaly, not Vitaly Ivanovich…

Christ. Oh Jesus Christ. Ivanovich. Ivan. In English, “Ivan” was “John.” 

_ John! _ he’d screamed. 

Peter spoke. “You are…John?”

“Not even remotely. But how interesting that you know the name.” Like an ice-floe, sides scraping an iron hull into ribbons. Water, little drops of harmless rain-water, which hollow out a stone over years. 

“Revenge?” Peter tried to throw as much scorn as possible into that word, to hide his ice-gutted terror. “Do you mean to tell me that you’ve wasted operational assets and your director’s time and money only to track down a few old questioners, like an obsessed Nazi hunter?”

“You gave the orders to the other three – you are a very special ‘questioner.’ And I am not a director nor an operative. I am the brother of that murdered Englishman. What I do, I do on my own.” 

Peter made himself laugh contemptuously, past his knotted stomach. He’d known all the ways of making a man scream with pain, how to cut him away a piece at a time without endangering him or killing him, until the order was given – and had been taught that at both ends of the table. Not again, he was an old man, a factory worker, he couldn’t face that again. Must anger him into killing quickly. “So, Vitaly Ivanovich Solomin, liar,” he sneered. “You will walk into this cell, look into the eyes of a man for whose children you are godfather, and take his life over a decades-old political matter that no longer exists. You have wasted your life for petty, useless revenge.”

“No. I will not lay a finger on any of you four. I made a promise.”

The door opened with a soft thick schlussing noise of insulation against insulation – the room was well-soundproofed, then. 

An old man hobbled into the cell. A short man, dressed in the English style, with eyes like the heart of an ice-floe, over a white moustache. 

Peter looked into those iceberg eyes, and his bowels evacuated. 

The man’s moustache quirked up in a smirk of disgust at the foul smell of Peter’s fear. He held up a pair of wire snips.

“This,” the last thing said by VItaly-not-Vitaly’s voice over the intercom, “is John.”

The door closed without making a sound.


End file.
